I use a lot of little utility apps. But they quickly age and get replaced by better. What are some of your current favorite utility programs?

I currently use Diskeeper, Registry Mechanic, Winrar, UltraEdit, FTP Voyager, Bulk Rename, and several others (but those are my faves).

I use exiftool along with a perl script to read the proprietary lens information from my camera files, translate to an ascii description of the lens, then write it back to the "standard" exif lens field so it's visible to applications besides the one that came with the camera.

Filezilla for ftp.
Vim for text file editing.
Registry Mechanic.

Bart

Foxit Reader 2.0 (Freeware) (http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Foxit_Reader/1102316680/1) Lighting fast replacement for horrible Acrobat/Adobe Reader.

FTP Commander (Freeware (http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/FTP_Commander/1035050973/1) Simple FTP software. Best free one that i have tested.

Gas and Electric

I use a lot of little utility apps. But they quickly age and get replaced by better. What are some of your current favorite utility programs?

I currently use Diskeeper, Registry Mechanic, Winrar, UltraEdit, FTP Voyager, Bulk Rename, and several others (but those are my faves).

Hi Doug, and now you can use Safari on your Windows box LOL

Margaret

Ant, you crack me up! LOL

Gas and Electric

Very dry humour Ant - no water!!!!!

Peter

Some of the utilities I use aren't really intended to be utilities.

Images can be resized in Apple's mail.app. Just drop an image on the mail icon and a new message will open with the image in the body of the message. Down in the right-hand corner is a little pop-up menu that lets you set the size of the image - normal, small, medium or large - then I send the email to myself and it arrives 2 seconds later in the size I picked. Why bother you ask? well, I always have Mail running and the whole operation takes less time than firing up Photoshop Elements or trying to find the dozens of other image manipulation apps I have.

For those who do web design/publishing etc., the new version of Safari has a neat "web inspector" you can invoke it using the right-click or ctrl-click contextual menu. You need to have the "Debug" menu turned on first - if you want to know more, let me know and I'll try to remember how I did it.

I also have a bunch of color utilities but for most things, I use Mac's color picker which is far more capable than you might think at first blush.

I use Pasteboard for keeping a running list of anything I copy or cut. It seems to go on forever, I should check to see if I can set it.

A little thing called "Free Ruler" is a ruler that you can move around for measuring things - valuable for web development.

MousePose is good for finding your mouse on a big screen and for showing the location of the mouse while teaching. Also for teaching, the Universal access preferences pane has some useful tools. On my PowerBook, I can zoom in just by holding down the ctrl key and dragging my fingers across the trackpad. I can set how I want it to zoom in the preferences pane.

There are also several apps - ScribbleScreen is one - that sit in front of all open windows and you can draw on the "ScribbleScreen" the the sportscasters do on tv to explain a play in football or hockey.

When I browse through my applications folder, I see a gazillion apps, but I'm hard pressed to come up with a way that I use most of them. The ones listed above are the ones I use and as you see, most of them are part of OSX (Tiger)

Margaret

PTFB Pro - Press the 'flippin' button. Auto replies to annoying messages.
Bulk rename utility
Foxit Reader
Roboform (auto form filler, password generator/keeper)
WMAConvert - Convert MP4 files from iTunes to MP3
Kaspersky antivirus
Printkey2000 - screen grabber

Pawsoft FASS (http://www.pawsoft.com/?p=fass/home )
Allows me to compile posts offline or view them before I post. Compile screen is larger than that on most online viewers, so it's easier to view.

Phrase Express (http://www.phraseexpress.com/)
Enables me to keep a whole lot of phrases I use regularly, and paste them easily into any posts I need them in.

MWSnap (http://www.mirekw.com/winfreeware/mwsnap.html)
My screen capture utility.

WhoIsView (http://www.mytoolpad.com/open/whoisview/)
Useful for looking up addresses and website info.

Registrar Lite (http://www.majorgeeks.com/download469.html)
My Registry Editor of choice, has a few useful tools that don't come with the standard M$ offering.

SIW (http://www.gtopala.com/)
Gives you more details about things on your computer than you ever want to know. Need to know what driver you've got installed for a device, what MoBo you're using SIW tells all.

Cryptainer LE (http://www.cypherix.com/cryptainerle/)
Gives me an encrypted "vault" where I can keep data I don't want others to access. Free version only stores 25 M in any one vault, though you can have more than one vault. Paid version allows larger capacity vaults.

All above utilities are free (I'm a Yorkshireman, and therefore only second to a Scot in my parsimony).

Like others, I also use Foxit Reader for PDF files. Got rid of the resource hogging bloat of Adobe Reader long ago, and have never regretted it.

For keeping my Mac system running smoothly:

Disk Warrior - I run this monthly to rebuild the disk directory.

and

Cocktail-- a general purpose utility that simplifies the use of advanced UNIX functions. A one button click allows me to clean, repair and optimize the system.



Pete

Gary, thanks for the tip/link for cryptainer. It looks to be a handy little program and I have already put it to use.

Alan

Gary, thanks for the tip/link for cryptainer. It looks to be a handy little program and I have already put it to use.

Alan

You're welcome Alan.

My list of essential utilities:

(1) AOL Active Virus Shield - free virus scanner with the kaspersky engine

(2) Spybot S&D - indispensible for spyware scans (I am on Win XP)

(3) Opera - best internet browser there is! Secure, fast and customizable.

(4) Winamp - excellent music player

(5) VLC - probably the best freeware video player

(6) Truecrypt - for encrypted file storage.

(7) Totalcopy - for moving stuff around on my home network.

(8) Foxit reader - for pdfs

(9) Daemon tools - for virtual optical drives.

(10) Diskeeper Pro - best defragger I've used. The only non-freeware utility on this list, but worth every penny! Fantastic software for hard drive defrags!

(11) Ccleaner -system 'cleaning'

(12) Winrar

winrar, divx, bittorrent clients, Power ISO, a-squared free, notepad (batch files), startup mechanic, video convertors, youtube flv to avi, cool edit pro

Don't use a2 free, it's known for having a history of false positives and has toasted more than one operating system before now.

I advise at 3 separate security forums so see these kind of problems a lot.

If you want a good general purpose trojan remover go for AVG Anti-Spyware, it's free also.

http://www.ewido.net/en/download/

Don't mind the link name, AVG Anti-Spyware used to be made by Ewido before they got taken over by AVG.

My Favorite utilities are

Mozilla
Winrar
Google Toolbar
Winzip
EditPlus
Java
Data Recovery (http://www.stellarinfo.com) Software

here is the software i cannot live without...

VLC Player (www.videolan.org) - kinda Universal media player
µTorrent (www.utorrent.com) - bit torrent client
WinRAR (www.rarlab.com) - zip/unizp multiple compression formats
Wordweb (www.wordweb.info) - handy offline English dictionary
Copernic Desktop Search (www.copernic.com) - desktop search engine
SlickRun (www.bayden.com) - tiny utility to launch applications by shortcuts

Hope you will find some of these useful for you too...

I would like to add Foxit Reader too to my list... Thanks to all those who mentioned about it in this thread...

No wonder that I already uninstalled the bulky Acrobat Reader :)

I just added ClipMate to my utility arsenal.

On The Macintosh...(OSX 10.4.X Tiger)

Quickeys: Makes macros for doing repetative tasks or boilerplate text etc.
ABDialer: Dials Phone numbers through your internal modem. Numbers can be copy/pasted to the clipboard or you can script the dialing in programs such as FileMaker Pro.
SuperDuper: Creates bootable backups to an external drive. Has scheduling capabilities.
ChronoSync: Backs up selected files and folders only. Has scheduling capabilities
(I use both backup methods. Full SuperDuper weekly, Files and Folders daily)
SnapzPro: Screen capture and QuickTime movie maker from the screen (how I make video tutorials-or grab videos from the web)
FileChute: An FTP type utility that lets me put stuff up on my .Mac site, then creates the URL on the clipboard that I can then include in an email so the recipient can download the file directly to their desktop.

Advanced Windows Care. IObit has created a nice little 1 click utility that sweeps for spyware, performs registry fixes, optimizes my system and removes junk files. I have installed it on 3 different machines and have seen a marked improvement in performance on all.